StrangeSox

I'd recommend that everyone go read "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland." It's not about policing per se. It's about the power of ideologically driven group think that can get, well, perfectly ordinary people to commit heinous crimes against their fellow man. The men in Battalion 101 weren't ardent Nazis. They were drafted into rear guard service from a fairly non Nazi part of Germany from not particularly Nazi friendly backgrounds and demographics. Nevertheless, their crimes against humanity slowly ratcheted up to marching thousands to the edge of mass graves, shooting the people in the base of the skull, and shoving them into the pit to make room for the next batch. American police forces obviously are not at Nazi mass murder. It's not anywhere I think they'd ever get. But the point is that sort of social organizational influence can lead nearly anyone to do horrific things in the right conditions. That sort of deep organizational rot seems to be where a lot of police forces are in this country today. A seige-occupation mentality where the people they are policing aren't their fellow citizens and residents but others. Look into David Grossman and the training his group gives to police agencies across the country that drills into them that they're all in war zones and need to be ready to kill. Even if you want to completely discount any analogies to modern policing issues, it's a very good and important book. Think Stanford prison experiments but, you know, horribly real.

More police violence on innocent people tonight, this time in Buffalo. Where are all the good cops immediately arresting the guy who just violently assaulted this man? edit: oh they're just blatantly lying about, natch

But you're arguing that as a society we abandon the children, outside of brutally policing them.

This article's a few years old, but the focus of it is early and mid-20th century housing and educational policy/funding. He focused on Chicago. Even if you don't come to the same ultimate conclusion as him, it's a thorough review of decades and really centuries of the prevention of accumulation of black wealth and the looting of whatever wealth the community obtains. edit: there's an ancient filibuster thread on the article as well as others like his "The Ghetto is Public Policy" which iirc was a genesis for the much larger article you linked https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/the-ghetto-is-public-policy/275456/ edit: I had asked Prof. Sharkey for some more info back when the article came out:

My wife's year ended on the 19th. The flood of submissions that came in between 12-4 from the students she spent weeks trying to get to turn in ANYTHING to bring their grades up was annoying but predictable.

I was referring to this part: Crime will happen no matter how much you flatten the curve. The types of crimes and the numbers might change. But people are people. And some people suck. Show me one socialist utopia where there is no crime because you have eliminated it with equality. I will wait. I'm pretty sure we all agree that you will never elminate crime. This is not an argument anyone in this thread of the people who have written at length about radically changing the nature of policing believe. Earlier in this thread, I linked a book as well as an interview with the author of the book. I even quoted an excerpt from the interview where he specifically addresses the sort of question you're bringing up. Here it is again: You don't fix things over night by simply "defunding the police," or "abolishing the police." It's a long road of total reform.

You are arguing against positions nobody is taking, and this has been pointed out several times to you now.

I linked an interview and an entire book that discusses these ideas at length if you're interested in understanding them. There were always be murders, of course. Beyond the top level slogan is a recognition of that and a proposal of a better way forward that will reduce overall crimes, reduce the societal burdens on policing, while still being able to handle the sorts of situations you're bringing up. Our current method of using policing as our main tool combined with mass incarceration has very clearly failed. We would likely need to start over root and branch given the current state of things. That's the core of the movement, but it doesn't naively pretend that there will be no crimes after that. Edit: to get to the heart of it, you're assuming a world where "gang bangers" always exist and will always exist as they currently do. If you address the things that lead to gangs and crime in the first place, rather than reactively through state use of force via police, you can reduce crime and the overall need for policing in the first place. It's not like there aren't plenty of countries we can point to a examples of much stronger social systems, lower crime rates, and much less policing and incarceration all over the world.

We've tried your way. It breeds more violence, more crime, more poverty, more suffering. For local news, the mayor of Joliet, former cop, got in on the violence:

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” -Coretta Scott King, wife of a man who was murdered for his nonviolent advocacy.

You are never going to police away crime. We see the fruits of that effort across the nation again tonight. Our current system creates massive underserved, impoverished communities of all races, though there are obviously desperate impacts. These are the conditions that bring about social disorder and crime. Pushing all of these issues onto policing ensures we have a never-ending, typically escalating cycle of poverty, crime and violence. I provided a whole book to read if you'd like. If you just want to dismiss any solution besides mass incarceration and more policing out of hand, so be it. There's not much room for discussion there. edit: this is where the "government isn't a nanny state, but it is a brutal, abusive fatherfigure" thinking gets us: I'm sick and tired of my fellow Americans being beaten and killed and harassed and robbed by state security forces.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail has a few things to say about it but this paragraph gets to the heart of it. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection

Yes, it is a radical proposal. The idea of depolicing is that the funding would be shifted to community services like education, housing, food, and health care that would reduce the things that drive crime and violence in the first place. You don't just flip a switch and disband all police forces and police powers over night. What you do is you start shifting resources and, crucially, responsibilities away from the police. You move them to actual social workers, health care workers, jobs programs, things that can actually attack the causes of most crime at its root. Tasking the police with handling all of that after the fact is setting up for failure and violence over and over and over again. If you want a more thorough examination of the idea of depolicing, a recent book examining the idea has been made available for free download by the publisher: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing There's a recent interview with the author here to give a flavor. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police

Most of these never make it that far thanks to the thin blue line. We've video evidence of thousands of police abusing our fellow citizens in just the past few days, ranging from simple petty vandalism of smashing in car windows to violent beating random people walking home from work. Where are all the good cops turning the bad apples out of their ranks, naming and reporting them, testifying against them? They're still marching right along side them, probably also launching tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of protesters. Banning the court-created Qualified Immunity is crucial as well.

There's at least a few good ones on the city council in Minneapolis But overall, yes, our political leaders across the country have largely failed the test yet again.

There is majority support in this country right now for burning down police stations. The police and our political leaders nearly across the board have mishandled this situation in ways I couldn't even imagine. edit: and it's stuff like we're seeing from the NYPD union, declaring war on the city in a fight of good vs evil, as to why. NYPD scanners picked up police telling each other to just shoot or run over protesters yesterday evening. https://www.wnyc.org/story/police-scanner-broadcasts-calls-shoot-and-run-over-protesters/

Things are already looking bad in a lot of states. They'll look much worse in a few weeks. Thread showing 7-day average of positive tests rising in multiple states across the country. Overall, outside of NY, NJ, and CT, the national positive rate is flat and now ticking back up a little.

Yes, thousands. We have hundreds of incidents on film from just the past few days. In many incidents, it's full riot lines of cops launching assaults on protesters. They are not being held accountable. We have nation-wide protests in hundreds of cities because of the actions of the police and their ever-escalating responses to protests, whether they stay completely peaceful or not. Or in many cases, random people not even involved in protests, some simply standing in their own front doors or walking home from work. The coordinated attacks on our fellow citizens are coming from the people wearing badges. Here's one decently long thread of police violence: Here's an even longer, ongoing one documenting nearly two hundred separate incidents in the past few days: And here's an idea of some of the good things we could do to actually help people if we reduced police funding: edit: instead, here is how municipal budgets often go:

There's perhaps something more morally righteous about these protests and their cause than getting drunk at a pool party. But there will definitely be outbreaks because of this. Unfortunate that the murder of yet another one of our fellow citizens sparked this off.

You may want to consider who is instigating the violence in many cases: Many, many more examples from across the country are available.